6 ms·

What is Congress browsing?

210 points by _pius 10y ago

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Here's a thought: why are we pressuring legislators when they're mostly accountable to their donors and party bosses? Why don't these sites track those people instead?
- pjmorris 10y ago
  Why not both? We could even use the data to custom-make the NASCAR-style suits people talk about, with decals for each rep's sponsorship.
- DannyBee 10y ago
  "when they're mostly accountable to their donors and party bosses" Because this is mostly a myth.
  - mtgx 10y ago
    No, it's not. It's proven that Congress abides by corporations' wishes 70% of the time, and it abides by the "People's" wishes close to 0% of the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
    - 557833 10y ago
      That video fails to mention that those numbers only apply to the very small (6% iirc) minority of issues where there's a statistically significant difference of opinion between "the people" and the rich. Also, the paper doesn't ascribe any reason for the effect. All that stuff about campaign finance is just editorializing from that video. It's just as possible that, for example, wealth and education are well correlated and Congress is siding with the well-educated 6% of the time.
    - kbenson 10y ago
      The reality is that right now they are often accountable to their donors and party bosses, but that is only because the public has ceded their power in those cases by not caring enough and/or consistently enough. They are ultimately accountable to the public, to an overwhelming degree. When the public does not care, that allows the other influences, which are ultimately much smaller to have an outsized influence. By not being consistent in caring about the outcomes of votes, the public has allowed other groups to not only have an influence, but to have it often. That trains representatives to consider those other groups on all votes, as those other groups are much better about keeping track of what the representatives do and holding them accountable later. So in the end, a small and weak but consistent group ends up having a disproportionate amount of influence compared to a large and powerful but largely inconsistent and absent group. What this means is that it both is, and is not a myth. It's true that donors and party bosses have a lot of power, but it's also true that the constituents control all the power, and it's only their lack of involvement that allows those donors and party bosses to have the power they do. Were constituents to become much more interested in everything their representative did starting tomorrow, the power of those donors and party bosses would vanish fairly quickly (depending on how likely the representative considered the increased interest to continue).
  - aantix 10y ago
    Citation?
    - DannyBee 10y ago
      You mean like the original had? The truth is congress does what donors/etc ask when people don't ask them otherwise. So it only happens on a small set of issues where people don't seem to care. Additionally, the mechanism that causes this is not actually the money. It's nice to think that, but it's really: They don't understand the issue, they mostly trust the lobbyists they know to tell them what the good thing to be doing is. IE the lobbyists are long time friends.
  - orthecreedence 10y ago
    "If I close my eyes tight enough, the corruption will go away!"
- TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
  Because a lot of these donations are through super PACs, which can't be traced.
- paxcoder 10y ago
  You can't wash your hands and blame everything on Satan. You are a human being with your own free will, responsible for your own choices. The legislators are morally responsible for the laws they support.
willvarfar 10y ago
So is there some image from this site we can all embed in our own sites and content so they get tracked more widely? Do govtrack welcome and have the bandwidth for that?
- joshdata 10y ago
  We'd consider helping with that, but someone else would need to take the lead on the effort. -- the guy behind GovTrack
eatbitseveryday 10y ago
> What is Congress browsing? This question implies something else: what are all the URLs referenced/accessed by Congress? The page says something different, and I believe the headline is misleading: > This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings. Of all pages one can browse on the web from within Congress machines, how relevant is GovTrack.us overall in that data? It's like saying the ISP publishes only my browsing data that happens to hit on my ISP's own website itself. Did I misunderstand something? A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress.
- Semiapies 10y ago
  This is a ridiculously misleading headline.
- BoringCode 10y ago
  > A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress. Except that would be illegal (and no ISP is going to sell raw data, even if they could)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Zigurd 10y ago
    What law is there to deter de-anonymizing data from an ISP? With a combination of ISP data, tracking cookies, etc. from multiple data providers, individually identifiable profiles should be possible.
- jackmott 10y ago
  yeah they need to extract data from cookies or go home.
- dmschulman 10y ago
  Only as misleading as people parroting that "ISPs can now sell your personal browsing history" after the passage of SJ Res. 34 I personally think this a fantastic and appropriate way to demonstrate the privacy issue to legislators, within the bounds of what is actually possible with the information that's out there
sushisource 10y ago
Someone in there is using Vivaldi? Wat?
sbov 10y ago
I won't hold my breath, but this could be interesting if this caught on with other more mainstream websites, and they all shared the same tracking cookie. Google Analytics for congress. As is it's obviously relatively limited.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Yea, I was expecting something on the page for adding a tacking cookie to your site to add your own data. It's interesting how many people do use their website from within the federal government IP ranges.
- zapt02 10y ago
  There is a very popular service in Sweden for exactly this. By freely embedding a tracking image on your website, you can see a listing of government, media and news agencies and which sites they visit: https://gnuheter.com/creeper/senaste https://gnuheter.com/creeper/senaste
  - samstave 10y ago
    Gosh, that should be a freaking law here in the US for every site to require inclusion of this...
    - a3n 10y ago
      I'm with you on the sentiment, but damn, I sure don't want the government telling me what I have to say. Voluntary, widespread, even "boycott the ones who don't do this!" All of that's free speech. But not mandated by law.
- mholt 10y ago
  I would like to see a Caddy[1] plugin that does this. A web server can see wider deployment over many sites, rather than a single site. Even if it's not a good way to draw specific inferences about specific browsing habits, it could be a good way to make a statement. [1] https://github.com/mholt/caddy https://github.com/mholt/caddy
strictnein 10y ago
Wish the hyperventilating over this issue would die down some. This page is about as pointless as possible. It shows when someone from the "House" or "Senate" visits a page. Okay, and from that we will strike a blow at the evil congressmen somehow?
dsschnau 10y ago
What a cool concept. Maybe there should be packages for major web frameworks that implements this.
emerman 10y ago
So this is certainly an interesting idea - it's entertaining and it feels enlightening but the reasoning behind it seems a bit off base. The assumption behind this effort seems to be a sort of retribution-based. So there's a couple things wrong with that - staff are the only ones using computers, not Members, and it doesn't bother us too much. We expect none of our browsing history to be private and are used to having every part of our jobs as public information - see Legistorm. Members are not going to care if their staff's web browsing information is public - even if it did go beyond just who is visiting govtrack and when. They'd fire the staff they needed to without hesitation and still show no remorse for their vote. This is without even mentioning that only Republican offices voted in support of the rollback of the FCC regulation. It's a harder issue to solve, but the problem really is that business interests will almost always trump constituent concerns. Having privacy groups come meet with Congressmembers helps - setting up an organized campaign helps somewhat too. But for Republicans, this bill was only a matter of what made economic sense.
- joshdata 10y ago
  It wasn't retribution. This was in the works for many years and this was just an opportunistic time to put it up / it became something people were suddenly interested in. -- the guy behind the linked site
- karmelapple 10y ago
  Even if this was built on retribution - which, as pointed out by the author of the website, it is not - I would still be glad it exists, even in spite of that rationale. It's not to harm you, the staffer who already knows everything you do is being tracked. Instead, I think it is to start conversations with less technically-inclined people about privacy. That the conversation can start with data from the offices of people who passed this legislation is important, because explaining it in a more broader sense can be difficult and, potentially, scary. It's good to hear you, as Congressional staff, know that your history is already tracked. GovTrack is doing nothing more than what you already expect. Just think if CNN started dumping this data for everyone in the country to start a conversation, though; that would be scarier and more of an invasion of privacy against unwitting citizens. Because GovTrack is only publishing your internet accesses of its site - rather than the much wider amount of information on Legistorm - this gives me a great way to inform people about what happens. I've already started a conversation with my friends and family about what tracking really happens on the internet. I have been surprised at the misunderstandings many of my friends have about what can and cannot be tracked by various actors online. The huge reach of Facebook and Google in tracking people and knowing what you like has confused many people about the difference between what those private companies know and what the ISP knows. I applaud GovTrack for providing this. Releasing it close to when the recent bill was passed by both houses of Congress is handy timing that will let that conversation continue with my less-tech-oriented friends and family. > It's a harder issue to solve, but the problem really is that business interests will almost always trump constituent concerns. And that's the conversation I can continue to have with my friends and family, thanks to this history readout on GovTrack.
amadeuspzs 10y ago
How useful to now have a list of most popular OS/Browser versions to maximize (spear)phishing attacks. > from House (PC / Windows 10 / Edge 14) > from Senate(PC / Windows 7 / Chrome 56) Will be fun to do some analysis after a while and see if there are any obvious trends (House vs Senate, where do outdated browser/OS combos visit the most).
ChiliDogSwirl 10y ago
I work for a local (County-level) government, and our firewall logs have been available by FOIA request for years. I can't say if congress is as transparent, but if people really are intent on exposing congress's web browsing habits, that would probably be a more productive way to begin.
- joshdata 10y ago
  The US Congress is not subject to federal FOIA law, so that would be impossible at the federal level. -- guy behind the linked site
  - a3n 10y ago
    It's good to be one of 537 kings.
sandworm101 10y ago
They should also track html referer tags. That should give insight into the blogs that staffers are reading, at least those that link people over to govtrack. Other data can be used to identify individual devices which, when tied to the known movements and appearances of public figures, should be enough to identify individuals. Heck, put the entire data dump online and crowdsource the project. Within weeks we'll know which senators are reading which bills while they commute, and which don't. To go the next step, govtrack could adopt some proper ad-based cookies to track users across multiple sites. But that would cost money. I'm surprised Larry Flint, and anyone else looking for dirt on politicians, haven't done this already.
ceautery 10y ago
God, they're all on Windows.
aorth 10y ago
Title is misleading. Should be "Is Congress browsing GovTrack.us?" From their FAQ: > This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings.

210 points by _pius 10y ago

Here's a thought: why are we pressuring legislators when they're mostly accountable to their donors and party bosses? Why don't these sites track those people instead?

pjmorris 10y ago
Why not both? We could even use the data to custom-make the NASCAR-style suits people talk about, with decals for each rep's sponsorship.
DannyBee 10y ago
"when they're mostly accountable to their donors and party bosses" Because this is mostly a myth.
- mtgx 10y ago
  No, it's not. It's proven that Congress abides by corporations' wishes 70% of the time, and it abides by the "People's" wishes close to 0% of the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
  - 557833 10y ago
    That video fails to mention that those numbers only apply to the very small (6% iirc) minority of issues where there's a statistically significant difference of opinion between "the people" and the rich. Also, the paper doesn't ascribe any reason for the effect. All that stuff about campaign finance is just editorializing from that video. It's just as possible that, for example, wealth and education are well correlated and Congress is siding with the well-educated 6% of the time.
  - kbenson 10y ago
    The reality is that right now they are often accountable to their donors and party bosses, but that is only because the public has ceded their power in those cases by not caring enough and/or consistently enough. They are ultimately accountable to the public, to an overwhelming degree. When the public does not care, that allows the other influences, which are ultimately much smaller to have an outsized influence. By not being consistent in caring about the outcomes of votes, the public has allowed other groups to not only have an influence, but to have it often. That trains representatives to consider those other groups on all votes, as those other groups are much better about keeping track of what the representatives do and holding them accountable later. So in the end, a small and weak but consistent group ends up having a disproportionate amount of influence compared to a large and powerful but largely inconsistent and absent group. What this means is that it both is, and is not a myth. It's true that donors and party bosses have a lot of power, but it's also true that the constituents control all the power, and it's only their lack of involvement that allows those donors and party bosses to have the power they do. Were constituents to become much more interested in everything their representative did starting tomorrow, the power of those donors and party bosses would vanish fairly quickly (depending on how likely the representative considered the increased interest to continue).
- aantix 10y ago
  Citation?
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    You mean like the original had? The truth is congress does what donors/etc ask when people don't ask them otherwise. So it only happens on a small set of issues where people don't seem to care. Additionally, the mechanism that causes this is not actually the money. It's nice to think that, but it's really: They don't understand the issue, they mostly trust the lobbyists they know to tell them what the good thing to be doing is. IE the lobbyists are long time friends.
- orthecreedence 10y ago
  "If I close my eyes tight enough, the corruption will go away!"
TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
Because a lot of these donations are through super PACs, which can't be traced.
paxcoder 10y ago
You can't wash your hands and blame everything on Satan. You are a human being with your own free will, responsible for your own choices. The legislators are morally responsible for the laws they support.

willvarfar 10y ago

So is there some image from this site we can all embed in our own sites and content so they get tracked more widely? Do govtrack welcome and have the bandwidth for that?

joshdata 10y ago
We'd consider helping with that, but someone else would need to take the lead on the effort. -- the guy behind GovTrack

eatbitseveryday 10y ago

> What is Congress browsing? This question implies something else: what are all the URLs referenced/accessed by Congress? The page says something different, and I believe the headline is misleading: > This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings. Of all pages one can browse on the web from within Congress machines, how relevant is GovTrack.us overall in that data? It's like saying the ISP publishes only my browsing data that happens to hit on my ISP's own website itself. Did I misunderstand something? A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress.

Semiapies 10y ago
This is a ridiculously misleading headline.
BoringCode 10y ago
> A better strategy would be to determine which ISP serves Congress, and pay them for the data of IPs originating from Congress. Except that would be illegal (and no ISP is going to sell raw data, even if they could)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Zigurd 10y ago
  What law is there to deter de-anonymizing data from an ISP? With a combination of ISP data, tracking cookies, etc. from multiple data providers, individually identifiable profiles should be possible.
jackmott 10y ago
yeah they need to extract data from cookies or go home.
dmschulman 10y ago
Only as misleading as people parroting that "ISPs can now sell your personal browsing history" after the passage of SJ Res. 34 I personally think this a fantastic and appropriate way to demonstrate the privacy issue to legislators, within the bounds of what is actually possible with the information that's out there

sushisource 10y ago

Someone in there is using Vivaldi? Wat?

sbov 10y ago

I won't hold my breath, but this could be interesting if this caught on with other more mainstream websites, and they all shared the same tracking cookie. Google Analytics for congress. As is it's obviously relatively limited.

djsumdog 10y ago
Yea, I was expecting something on the page for adding a tacking cookie to your site to add your own data. It's interesting how many people do use their website from within the federal government IP ranges.
zapt02 10y ago
There is a very popular service in Sweden for exactly this. By freely embedding a tracking image on your website, you can see a listing of government, media and news agencies and which sites they visit: https://gnuheter.com/creeper/senaste https://gnuheter.com/creeper/senaste
- samstave 10y ago
  Gosh, that should be a freaking law here in the US for every site to require inclusion of this...
  - a3n 10y ago
    I'm with you on the sentiment, but damn, I sure don't want the government telling me what I have to say. Voluntary, widespread, even "boycott the ones who don't do this!" All of that's free speech. But not mandated by law.
mholt 10y ago
I would like to see a Caddy[1] plugin that does this. A web server can see wider deployment over many sites, rather than a single site. Even if it's not a good way to draw specific inferences about specific browsing habits, it could be a good way to make a statement. [1] https://github.com/mholt/caddy https://github.com/mholt/caddy

strictnein 10y ago

Wish the hyperventilating over this issue would die down some. This page is about as pointless as possible. It shows when someone from the "House" or "Senate" visits a page. Okay, and from that we will strike a blow at the evil congressmen somehow?

dsschnau 10y ago

What a cool concept. Maybe there should be packages for major web frameworks that implements this.

emerman 10y ago

So this is certainly an interesting idea - it's entertaining and it feels enlightening but the reasoning behind it seems a bit off base. The assumption behind this effort seems to be a sort of retribution-based. So there's a couple things wrong with that - staff are the only ones using computers, not Members, and it doesn't bother us too much. We expect none of our browsing history to be private and are used to having every part of our jobs as public information - see Legistorm. Members are not going to care if their staff's web browsing information is public - even if it did go beyond just who is visiting govtrack and when. They'd fire the staff they needed to without hesitation and still show no remorse for their vote. This is without even mentioning that only Republican offices voted in support of the rollback of the FCC regulation. It's a harder issue to solve, but the problem really is that business interests will almost always trump constituent concerns. Having privacy groups come meet with Congressmembers helps - setting up an organized campaign helps somewhat too. But for Republicans, this bill was only a matter of what made economic sense.

joshdata 10y ago
It wasn't retribution. This was in the works for many years and this was just an opportunistic time to put it up / it became something people were suddenly interested in. -- the guy behind the linked site
karmelapple 10y ago
Even if this was built on retribution - which, as pointed out by the author of the website, it is not - I would still be glad it exists, even in spite of that rationale. It's not to harm you, the staffer who already knows everything you do is being tracked. Instead, I think it is to start conversations with less technically-inclined people about privacy. That the conversation can start with data from the offices of people who passed this legislation is important, because explaining it in a more broader sense can be difficult and, potentially, scary. It's good to hear you, as Congressional staff, know that your history is already tracked. GovTrack is doing nothing more than what you already expect. Just think if CNN started dumping this data for everyone in the country to start a conversation, though; that would be scarier and more of an invasion of privacy against unwitting citizens. Because GovTrack is only publishing your internet accesses of its site - rather than the much wider amount of information on Legistorm - this gives me a great way to inform people about what happens. I've already started a conversation with my friends and family about what tracking really happens on the internet. I have been surprised at the misunderstandings many of my friends have about what can and cannot be tracked by various actors online. The huge reach of Facebook and Google in tracking people and knowing what you like has confused many people about the difference between what those private companies know and what the ISP knows. I applaud GovTrack for providing this. Releasing it close to when the recent bill was passed by both houses of Congress is handy timing that will let that conversation continue with my less-tech-oriented friends and family. > It's a harder issue to solve, but the problem really is that business interests will almost always trump constituent concerns. And that's the conversation I can continue to have with my friends and family, thanks to this history readout on GovTrack.

amadeuspzs 10y ago

How useful to now have a list of most popular OS/Browser versions to maximize (spear)phishing attacks. > from House (PC / Windows 10 / Edge 14) > from Senate(PC / Windows 7 / Chrome 56) Will be fun to do some analysis after a while and see if there are any obvious trends (House vs Senate, where do outdated browser/OS combos visit the most).

ChiliDogSwirl 10y ago

I work for a local (County-level) government, and our firewall logs have been available by FOIA request for years. I can't say if congress is as transparent, but if people really are intent on exposing congress's web browsing habits, that would probably be a more productive way to begin.

joshdata 10y ago
The US Congress is not subject to federal FOIA law, so that would be impossible at the federal level. -- guy behind the linked site
- a3n 10y ago
  It's good to be one of 537 kings.

sandworm101 10y ago

They should also track html referer tags. That should give insight into the blogs that staffers are reading, at least those that link people over to govtrack. Other data can be used to identify individual devices which, when tied to the known movements and appearances of public figures, should be enough to identify individuals. Heck, put the entire data dump online and crowdsource the project. Within weeks we'll know which senators are reading which bills while they commute, and which don't. To go the next step, govtrack could adopt some proper ad-based cookies to track users across multiple sites. But that would cost money. I'm surprised Larry Flint, and anyone else looking for dirt on politicians, haven't done this already.

ceautery 10y ago

God, they're all on Windows.

aorth 10y ago

Title is misleading. Should be "Is Congress browsing GovTrack.us?" From their FAQ: > This page is a public record of any time someone visits GovTrack.us from within the United States Senate, House of Representatives, or the White House, and their associated office buildings.